Naturalism: what it is and what are its characteristics

In 1867 the novel saw the light in France Therese Raquin, written by Émile Zola (1840-1902), the great standard-bearer of naturalism. The novel was tremendously controversial, since it condensed in its pages the main characteristics of this current, which the hypocritical bourgeois society did not like at all.

In the time when Therese Raquin Was published, the realism it had already succeeded as an artistic movement; however, Zola's naturalism was a further twist. As he himself states in his prologue to the second edition of the novel, his intention was none other than expose their characters to certain situations and study their reactions, as if they were coming from a laboratory will try Zola compares his work to that of a surgeon dissecting a corpse for his study. In this prologue, famous in the history of literature, the author was capturing what would be the naturalistic stream.

Naturalism as an artistic and literary current

It is necessary to point out that naturalism does not exist as an artistic current. That is to say, in the plastic arts (especially in painting) realism continued to prevail, the depiction of reality with frequent social criticism behind it. However,

the naturalist movement is circumscribed practically entirely to the literary field. Let's see it.

Realism and naturalism or the reaction against the romantic movement

Around 1850, the ideas of the Romanticism they are completely outdated. The world has changed; The West is immersed in the Second Industrial Revolution, social differences and human dramas proliferate in crowded cities. They are the beginnings of the labor movements, of socialism, of anarchism and of social denunciations. There is no longer time to entertain yourself in ideal landscapes: the artist has the obligation to come down to earth and join the social cause.

The realistic trend puts romantic musings aside and changes its source of inspiration, which goes from legends and ideal paradises to focusing exclusively on the surrounding reality and, above all, on the conflicts of a troubled society. It was the painter Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) who gave rise to the term realism and that, in 1855, he exhibited his canvas The painter's workshop, one of the landmarks of realism in general and of Courbet's painting in particular.

The so-called Barbizon School, who drew the motifs of his paintings from the surrounding reality. Children of this school are Courbet himself and other outstanding names of French realism, such as They are Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), Camille Corot (1796-1875) and Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878). With them flourishes realistic landscape painting that avoids fantastic or symbolic elements, so dear to the romantics. Just compare a landscape by any of the artists mentioned with the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), for example.

Naturalism is, without a doubt, the son and heir of the realistic precepts. However, as we have already commented, there is no naturalist movement as such in the plastic arts, although there is in literature. In fact, some of the authors of naturalism are great names in universal literature, such as the aforementioned Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant and Gustave Flaubert in France and Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán in Spain, among many others. others.

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What differentiates realism from naturalism?

Broadly speaking, we could say that naturalism is one more twist on realism, which takes the concept of capturing reality to the limit. Because while its predecessor is inspired by that and takes its motives from there, naturalism suppresses any moral value and reduces the human being to a mere machine without any control over his own life. In other words: according to naturalism, men and women lack free will and act according to their genetics, their environmental factors and their mental fluctuations.

in the novel Therese Raquin, Zola presents two characters, Thérèse and Laurent, absolutely driven by their most primal passions. Neither one nor the other can escape their drives, and both are subjected, as the author affirms in the aforementioned prologue, "to nerves and blood." However, it seems that Zola was the most radical of the literary naturalists, since in other authors, such as Fédor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), the leading Russian naturalist, we guess, behind the inevitable condemnation, a hope of redemption.

This is very clear, for example, in his best-known work, Crime and Punishment, where the crime committed and motivated by the most dark aspects of the character has the possibility of being atoned for, which makes it very clear that, in effect, in Dostoyevsky the choice does exist individual.

We can conclude, as far as the differences between the two movements are concerned, that while realism is a representation of reality, naturalism becomes a certain perversion of this realistic vision and suppresses any element that is not scientific. In naturalistic works there is only room for nature in its crudest expression, and that is precisely where the name of the movement comes from.

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Naturalism and its biased view of reality

The scientific currents of the moment had a lot to do with the gestation of naturalism; especially, the determinism and evolutionism of Charles Darwin (1809-1882). The first considers that no human act is completely free, since it is inevitably conditioned by factors beyond our control, such as instincts, genetics, or the environment that surrounds us. As for the second, his theory of the adaptation of the species and the survival of the most preparations is closely related to what was mentioned above and, of course, with the ideas of the naturalism: If the human being is conditioned by his nature and by what surrounds him, he must necessarily adapt to survive..

Certainly, and as the critic Manuel de la Revilla Moreno (1846-1881) maintains in his essay naturalism in art, published in 1879 and thus contemporary with the movement, Naturalism focuses on only one aspect of reality. The author comments that, just as Classicism focused on the heroic and epic and Romanticism on the ideal, the naturalism captures only the vulgar of reality, and omits the beautiful and great aspects of nature human.

De la Revilla is somewhat right. Naturalism boasts of being, as Zola comments, a scientific study of reality, but in his observation he overlooks elements that are also part of it and that, in truth, do not interest him. naturalist writers radicals, such as Émile Zola himself, are only interested in the aspects sordid, those that can shake the corseted morality of bourgeois society: sexual inhibition, crimes, primary drives, mental alienation.

Therefore, we quite agree with De la Revilla that this current does not cease to be, in the background, one more rebellion, as Romanticism was in its day, and as will be later the vanguards. After all, the post-romantic artist can no longer limit himself to copying reality without imbuing it with part of his subjective self.